This elegant volume brings together ten essays that focus on exile, through three central themes: kings (a shorthand for members of royal families), convicts and commemoration. It is situated at the intersection of histories of banishment, labour, and empire and is refreshingly multi-disciplinary in approach. The focus is primarily on those parts of the Indian Ocean world that faced the brunt of Dutch, British and French imperial rules during the 17^th to 19^th centuries. A single essay by Carol Liston on English and Irish convicts in New South Wales seems a little out of place despite its quality and potential for comparative analysis. The other essays describe the forced movement of peoples from parts of South and Southeast Asia to places as diverse as the Cape of Good Hope, Colombo, Jaffna, Madras, Singapore, Ambon, and Penang. The result is a beautifully knitted collection of essays that taken together succeed in creating a genuinely transnational history of exile.

The ten chapters build on the familiar story of penal transportation and forced migration. This movement of peoples was the result of laws of sovereign banishment that applied to French, Dutch and British imperial spaces: they condemned deposed kings and rebels as well as convicts to distant carceral settlements or confined them to lives of displacement and loss. Each chapter of the volume under review focuses on a specific case study centered around the exile of an individual or a social formation. There is little uniformity in the different cases. The lives in exile of King Amangkurat III in Ceylon or sultan Hamengkubuwana II of Yogyakarta in Penang, men of stature and privilege, and their entourage had very little in common with the conditions of exiled Indonesian slaves in the Cape of Good Hope.

It is the reason for an exile that shaped the different type of exilic experience. Elites got sent away from the places where they had exerted authority to abate potential civil unrest and to avoid creating martyrs by executing them. Non-elite groups, slaves and convicts—who had their labour extracted to construct the infrastructure of newly conquered places in Asia, as Clare Anderson explains in the opening chapter of the volume—served the purpose of empire building. These two groups seldom met and have left different types of traces for historians to collect.

A unique quality of the essays resides in the use of a diverse and multi-lingual archive to explore the exilic experience. Vernacular sources add a new layer to the story of forced migration. The essays in this volume provide us with what Engseng Ho has so adequately termed “a view from the other boat”. These rare accounts and testimonies in vernacular languages are beautifully exploited to paint an intricate canvas that transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire. Elites exiled to distant parts of the empire wrote petitions, letters, poems and even books where they evoked their feelings and lives in their new homes. The Javanese historical chronicles—babad—until now an understudied genre are interrogated anew in contributions by Sri Margana and Ronit Ricci. Letters from exiles to family and friends available in Dutch or English translation, petitions and poems such as that of a Vietnamese prisoner sent to New Caledonia in 1864 described by Patterson inflect history towards the realm of intimacy and sentiments. Another important source skilfully analysed by Gelman Taylor is the inventories of the Cape of Good Hope Orphan Chamber that help recreate the lives of Indonesian slaves who constituted the largest group of slaves until the early 18^th century. Yangs’ use of letters written in Gurmukhi by Nihal Singh and his “disciple” Kharak Singh that add to our understanding of the “emotional state of exile” (83) enrich his essay on the Sikh maharajah exiled to Singapore.

A turn to exile as a vantage point complicates the story of the nation-state and reveals the precariousness and complexity of the fabric of empires. What new insights do we get on European colonialism looked at through the lens of exile? All the personal stories recounted in the book disclose unexpected connections forged across time and space. Another feature that comes through is the inability of colonial powers to exert flawless surveillance over their subjects, particularly in Penny Edwards’ study of a Burmese prince who succeeds so well in evading capture and bewildering those in power in two colonial regimes. The fissures in the colonial state are similarly laid bare in Paterson's superb account of subversive poems that made their way back into Vietnam with the help of an exiled Vietnamese dissenter.

Exile contends Ronit Ricci was a catalyst for change. The exilic experience fashioned new social worlds. Jean Gelman Taylor shows the possibility of social advancement teased from within extractive labour conditions. Much evidence is marshalled to show that people crafted new lives, as they refashioned and re-imagined age-old social hierarchies and gender roles. For Yogyakarta's ruler Hamengkubuwana II and his family, socially mingling with European colonial society brightened exile. However, one may wonder if this transformation is typical of the condition of exile or something common to all forms of migration.

The exilic experience survived in different ways. Commemorated in some cases, reconfigured or erased in others, it all depended on the needs of the present. Nihal Singh's tombstone was kept alive then revitalized after the Second World War while Bandanese, in Kaartinen’ chapter, moved (or compelled to move) to the Kei islands more than 500 kilometres away from their homeland, denied their condition of exile and instead claimed a history of resistance.

This book is, in short, an insightful and intriguing exploration of worlds of exile through Dutch, British and French case studies. It re-reads “convicts” as “convict workers” considering the social and personal lives of some of these banished individuals owing to the rich archive of surveillance of colonial states. In the case of enslaved and other subaltern people, who formed the bulk of the exiles there are limited sources to write histories of sentiment and feeling. The chapters by Anderson, Gelman Taylor, Liston, Patterson, and Yang make a laudable effort towards accessing the consciousness of the non-literate rather than only focusing on their lives of labour. This book signals the need for more close readings of the colonial and vernacular archive as well as oral histories if one is to understand the way longing and dislocation is experienced among non-literate groups. One may need to test further the contention that exile blurred “lines between prince, convict laborer and slave” (1). These quibbles apart, Exile in Colonial Asia is an excellent and thought-provoking volume that deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in empire, forced migration and transnational history.